I was chatting with a neighbor this weekend. He's an architect, and, upon noticing that I was wearing a Bing t-shirt, mentioned that now at his firm most everyone has switched to using Bing. The reason being that the image search was superior to Google's. Bing's image search, in addition to providing different - in this case, better - results, innovated the page-less scrolling of results.
The model of attracting people via a key feature, which beats the competition, then encouraging them to stay for all the other features is, naturally, what the fight for users is all about. Here's an article from the New York Times, via Techmeme, which illustrates the feature war with a number of similar stories. Such stories are, of course, anecdotal, but each user is one by their own anecdote.
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